What happened to film under Blair?

Not with a bang but a simper ... Michael Sheen as Blair in Stephen Frears's The Queen

When Tony Blair finally embarks on the ex-PM's traditional campaign of giving lucrative lectures and writing unrevealing memoirs, I sense that his enigmatic, haunted, resentful face will probably seep into popular culture and into the movies quite a lot.

Michael Sheen's sympathetic performance as Blair in Stephen Frears's The Queen showed how his personality offers rich pickings for an actor. And that was set in the innocent era of 1997, when he was still loved. How much more poignant to show him the 21st century: the era of Blair At Bay. Surely a great film could be made about the tragicomic, uncomprehending "relationship" between Tony Blair and George W Bush showing the prime minister getting panicked and flattered and browbeaten into supporting America's retaliatory adventures. The scene in which the President first invites Mr Blair to pray with him would be pure gold. Sheen might reprise his performance as Blair, if he's not sick of it by now. My choice as Bush would be the New York-born actor Anthony Heald.

Apart from Michael Sheen in The Queen, the only Blair turns thus far have been on the small screen - although here a special mention has to be made for Oscar-winning Hollywood star Jamie Foxx, and his little-known performance as "Black Tony Blair" on TV opposite Dave Chappelle as "Black George Bush".

The British cinema world has ambivalent feelings about Blair's legacy to them. There's no doubt that his government really did do a good deal for the industry, taking it seriously as no other administration had before, and channelling huge amounts of Lottery cash in its direction, although the Treasury periodically tightened up the tax loopholes in "partnership funding" and now the 2012 Olympics is claiming so much of these resources, cinema, like the rest of the arts, might start feeling the pinch.

When I blogged on this subject last month, many responded by noting that however much the industry might have perked up, British cinema as a high art-form has declined. Terence Davies is facing a titanic struggle getting any project off the ground. Peter Greenaway meets massive indifference and most of his funding and support comes from Europe. The same goes for Ken Loach, whose Cannes triumph was rewarded with a bellow of disdain from the conservative press. Even some high-profile commercial adventures have come unstuck. With some fanfare, BBC Films bankrolled two Woody Allen films made and set in Britain. The first, Match Point, was a reasonable success; the second, Scoop, was a flop, and hasn't even been released over here.

The Blair reign also coincided with a huge resurgence in political documentaries: a genre known in Hollywood, a little acidly, as the "What's Up?" doc. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 was the explosive example; in this country Adam Curtis's The Power Of Nightmares was respectfully aired at the Cannes film festival.

However exercised these documentaries are about Iraq, though, Tony Blair is not attacked or even noticed all that much. The target tends to be the Bush administration. Indeed, almost every recent politically aware fiction feature, made anywhere in the world, required at least one scene with the TV on in the background, showing a famous politician justifying the Iraq war. But the flickering face on the screen in the corner is Bush, or Rumsfeld, but not Blair. Gallingly, tellingly, he doesn't seem to be important enough.

The remarkable thing is that Tony Blair is a savvy and clued-in figure in a way so many of his predecessors and contemporaries aren't. That extraordinary, and extraordinarily accomplished "Am I bovvered?" performance in the Comic Relief TV sketch with Catherine Tate showed that he does "get" pop culture. (Try to imagine John Major or Margaret Thatcher or Jim Callaghan doing that sketch - or David Cameron or Gordon Brown.)

It isn't such a stretch to imagine a different fate for the young Tony Blair when he came down from Oxford. He could have been in the media - some cynics would argue that this is precisely where he has been, all along. Or he could have had Tim Bevan or Eric Fellner's career in the movies: a producer, a player. He could have been an intelligent, liberal, prosperous, laid-back guy bringing out films like Mr Bean and United 93. It would have suited his talent for administration, his interest in the creative arts, his flair for getting things done. He wouldn't have had to endure so much personal flak.